


The happiness one thinks about

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-29
Updated: 2017-10-29
Packaged: 2019-01-26 06:19:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12551048
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: Andrew thinks about thePhaedrus.





	The happiness one thinks about

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AMarguerite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/gifts).



> For AMarguerite, who prompted for 'Andrew Raynes, missed call.'

Andrew ran his finger along the jagged stub which was all that remained of the flyleaf. For all their other differences, the households of his childhood had agreed upon the wickedness of defacing books, and the rough edge, catching on cracked skin, transmitted the obscure frisson of acts that are high crimes in the nursery calendar, yet barely misdemeanours in grown-up life. Why had Laurie given him the book at all? Had he imagined that Andrew would not remember the signature above ‘L.P. Odell’, that tearing out the page mitigated the oddness of the gift?

Ralph Ross Lanyon hadn't seemed like the sort of man who would read Plato, or bequeath his copy of the _Phaedrus_ to a younger boy when he left school. He hadn't seemed like the sort of man who had gone to a public school at all. Andrew reproved himself for this snobbish thought: there had been scholarship boys at Leighton Park with the accents of the industrial north-west too, and back then he had made a point of sitting rather hard on fellows inclined to cruel mimicry. Moreover, a wound at once minor in the grand scheme of things, but debilitating enough to end any chance of active service, might do a good deal to coarsen a certain sort of character. And he was clearly very ashamed of it: Andrew had seen enough injuries to be automatically rather than consciously tactful about where he let his eyes settle, but the gloved hand thrust deep in his left pocket was almost calculated to draw attention. 

Was there any real reason why a man who has read Plato should not also be capable of saying, _Well I suppose “great friend” is one way of putting it, dearie. He’s been cheerfully giving it me up the arse every chance he’s got since I swung him the transfer out of this dump. Not the sort of thing you do for an enemy, is it?_ It could not be true, and yet it had the ghastly light touch of veracity. And anyway, wasn't that exactly the point of the parable? Laurie’s précis had been brief but vivid: _black and scruffy, with a thick neck, a flat face, hairy fetlocks, grey bloodshot eyes and shaggy ears…_ and that beast was yoked indissolubly to the clean, graceful grey who read and understood Socratic philosophy. Yet there was something indefinably misaligned about the whole situation, that couldn’t be attributed solely to his own wishful thinking. He wished he were not always so tired, too tired to think. 

Andrew had been very angry with Dave at first, struggled (unsuccessfully, he feared) not to show it. He had even suspected him of dishonesty: it seemed impossible that Laurie would come so far, at such hazard, then of his own accord change his mind about seeing him. Dave must have done something to dissuade―and he had, in his way, been right. This thought startled him, and he examined it for signs of sanctimony. He found none: Dave had been right to do it, though not quite for the reasons he thought he was. Laurie had chosen, and Andrew was not his choice: he did not want a Laurie who was someone else’s lover as his good friend. No-one expected a man who’d made a proposal to a girl and been turned down to be more than polite afterwards; to carry on making up to her would justly be regarded as the act of a pest. And this wasn’t so very different. He regretted the importuning tone of his letter’s last paragraph. He should not have put Laurie in the position of being either a liar or a―he snorted softly―a corrupter of youth. 

And now, he supposed, he had a chance finally to be corrupted, to read the dialogue that had so nearly been the catalyst for his self-confession, that time by the big elm, overlooking the field of barley, and he thought Laurie’s too. Of course, that had been before Lanyon had returned to Laurie's life. He turned to the title-page and put his thumb over his own name, scribbled in Laurie’s hurried hand, smudged where the ink hadn't had a chance to dry. He flipped past the preface―he liked to form his own impression first―to the text itself. He was glad there was a facing translation: his Greek had only just been up to the _Phaedo_ , and it had oxidised with a year’s disuse and exposure to hard manual labour. _My dear Phaedrus, whence come you, and whither are you going?_

‘Good question,’ he muttered aloud, and in sudden exasperation shut the book. He did not have time; he was too tired. The sounds of the house broke back into his thoughts: a step on the stairs―Tom’s heavy, not Dave’s considerate one―the clatter of something falling to the linoleum, the lavatory flushing. He put the _Phaedrus_ into his bedside locker, and got up to join the practical bustle, the mindless, obliterating noise. 

The receipt of Laurie’s abashed letter explaining that he had been the victim of an imposture, though not of a deception as to the material facts of the case, made the book too painful to think of or to touch for some time. After he'd got over that, Andrew sometimes felt himself drawn back to it, and occasionally he got as far as opening it, once to read the best part of four pages. It would be nearly three years before he finished it, while recovering from jaundice in the military hospital of a small Italian colonial town in the green belt of Cyrenaica. It was the second of the speeches, Socrates’ send-up of Sophistry, that captured his imagination: in its unexpected bravura, he glimpsed the irresistible magnetism of a dazzlingly mobile intelligence allied to real goodness. The allegory of the charioteer was beautiful, but it had no resonance with either of the love affairs he had experienced since leaving England, and little enough with his memory of Laurie. Physical love did not, for him, jar with wanting the best for the person you loved: it was rather an extension of that affectionate desire. The third speech seemed specific to the culture of Athenian pederasty, with its inevitable inequality between the partners, where the second dismantled and disarmed the malaise of cynicism, which was both universal and very particular to the twentieth century. With a pang more intense than anything he had felt for him since those last few weeks of 1940, Andrew wished he could tell Laurie this. But, he reflected, sinking back on the lumpy, insufficient bolster, if Laurie hadn’t worked it out for himself by now, they might not have all that much to say to one another, not any more.


End file.
